US Weighs Budget-Neutral Bitcoin (BTC) Buys for 325,000-BTC Reserve, Ex-Adviser Witt Says

A Taxpayer-Free Acquisition Review

The United States government is examining how it could add Bitcoin (BTC) to its national stockpile without imposing any new burden on taxpayers, according to Patrick Witt, who served as executive director of the President's Digital Asset Advisory Council until his departure became public on Oct. 14. Witt laid out the state of the review in an interview published on Oct. 12, while he was still in office, so his account describes deliberations inside the administration rather than an approved plan. The work descends from the executive order President Trump signed on March 6, 2025. That order created the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and instructed officials to design a budget-neutral strategy for further acquisitions, meaning the government may take on more coins only through means that require no fresh spending and no new taxes. The reserve is meant as a long-term national holding, not a trading book, and the same order pairs it with a broader United States digital asset stockpile. The size of the existing stack was put on record in September by the blockchain analytics firm Arkham, whose on-chain work estimates government holdings at roughly 325,000 Bitcoin (BTC), almost all of it from seizures and forfeitures tied to criminal investigations. Measured per address, a state holding of that scale would rank among the largest clusters of crypto whale wealth on the network, yet the federal position has grown only when enforcement delivered coins, never through a deliberate purchase. Closing that gap between mandate and balance sheet is the task Witt described. Markets have barely moved on the news: the Bitcoin price sits near $81,300, about 3.2% lower over the past 24 hours, and no White House or Treasury statement has confirmed an actual purchase program.

Three families of funding route are under discussion, each chosen because it avoids a fresh appropriation. Witt said Congress has not granted the administration authority to buy Bitcoin on the open market with new budget money, which rules out the most direct method for now. The first workaround under study is to collect existing government inflows in Bitcoin (BTC): tariffs, taxes and payments for government services could be taken in BTC, and existing revenue streams could be converted straight into the reserve. The second idea revalues the gold the government already owns on its books and routes the accounting gain into coin purchases, recycling a paper revaluation into reserve funding, a mechanism that lands in the middle of the ongoing gold-versus-Bitcoin debate. The third option would put idle, government-controlled electricity to work mining Bitcoin, adding supply through the proof of work process that secures the network instead of buying coins on the open market, and Witt pointed to the small modular reactors under discussion for military bases as a possible power source. The president has kept the door open in public: asked at the White House on Aug. 19 about plans to acquire large amounts of BTC and other assets, Trump replied that the matter was being discussed. Every route shares one property: none requires Congress to vote new money. The wider Bitcoin reserve file therefore sits at the intersection of fiscal policy and digital asset strategy, still at the study stage, with no amounts, counterparties or start dates attached to any mechanism.

What Budget Neutrality Leaves Open

The arithmetic explains the shape of the review. A 325,000 BTC reserve grows only as enforcement hands over coins, so without an appropriation the budget-neutral tools, tariff receipts, gold revaluation and state-run mining, are effectively the only levers left, and none of them can be switched on overnight. Long-horizon demand theses such as the case for Bitcoin above $175,000 in coming quarters do not depend on Washington buying this quarter; sovereign accumulation would sit as an incremental layer on top. The immediate uncertainty is personnel: Witt described the review days before leaving the council on Oct. 14, and no successor or timeline has been named, which makes the next public accounting of the file, not the mechanisms themselves, the thing to watch.